The challenge: ooba identified a strategic imperative to refocus on their sales effectiveness.
ooba is a household name in South Africa. As the leading experts in property financing, they have a national footprint and employ over 400 people. The culture at ooba is people-focused and target driven, with a strategic focus on building capability and ensuring talent retention.
More than half of ooba’s workforce falls within their sales division. Due to the high-pressure nature of the environment, it is critical that each employee is aligned to their role and performs at their best. Given that much of ooba’s sales originate from well-established industry relationships, there is also a strong focus on talent retention and ensuring top performers are engaged with the business.
In earlier years, the company hired technical experts with experience in the home loan industry into sales positions. Whilst knowledgeable, it became evident that these technical experts were not always best suited to handle the sales process from end- to-end. Restructuring the roles and processes to maximise performance and remain competitive thus became a priority for ooba.
“We realised that we had no way to empirically assess the potential of our people to sell effectively.”
Linda Roos, Group Head of Human Capital
The Hiring for Sales Solution
ooba started measuring objective sales potential to find the best new talent and ensure the success of existing employees.
ooba partnered with Lumenii to make use of their online talent management portal and assessments.
By focusing on the specific strengths of each individual, ooba is able to place people into distinct roles within the sales process where they will be most effective.
Aside from assessing their overall ability to sell, which is a critical starting point, employees are further placed into roles depending on their aptitude to generate leads versus their ability to partner with a client to structure the best deal. The sales team is thus constructed by leveraging the strengths of each contributor.
To find the best sales people, ooba makes use of Lumenii’s Sales Potential Index (SPI), a comprehensive competency-based report that provides an overall indicator of sales success as well as detailed insight into a candidate’s behaviour and distinctive characteristics for each of the 11 research based sales competencies.
The SPI provides ooba with an objective measure of sales success, cutting down interviewing time and finding commercially driven people who get results. It also enables them to maximise the performance of existing employees.
By knowing the innate abilities of the individual, ooba maximises the success of their recruitment process and the performance of their existing people. These principles are applied when repositioning existing sales people, as well as for new recruits.
The outcome
ooba now uses Lumenii’s assessments, insights and analytics throughout their talent management lifecycle
Since the success of their sales restructuring, ooba has rolled out the online talent assessment to different parts of the organisation over time.
They now measure the competency potential, Learning Agility, cognitive ability and motivations of prospective candidates to ensure they align with ooba’s culture and the requirements of the role.
ooba also uses Lumenii to assess 360-degree performance and Agility, as the foundation of their performance management programme.
These insights help ooba understand employee strengths and which underdeveloped competencies to focus on. This enables constructive performance conversations between line managers and employees, and feeds into personal development plans with clear priorities for growth.
“Lumenii has created the ability for us to accurately measure potential and performance.”
Linda Roos, Group Head of Human Capital
